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What Is Hillary Clinton Afraid Of?

Over the 25 years Hillary Clinton has spent in the national spotlight, she’s been smeared and stereotyped, the subject of dozens of over-hyped or downright fictional stories and books alleging, among other things, that she is a lesbian, a Black Widow killer who offed Vincent Foster then led an unprecedented coverup, a pathological liar, a real estate swindler, a Commie, a harridan. Every aspect of her personal life has been ransacked; there’s no part of her 5-foot-7-inch body that hasn’t come under microscopic scrutiny, from her ankles to her neckline to her myopic blue eyes—not to mention the ever-changing parade of hairstyles that friends say reflects creative restlessness and enemies read as a symbol of somebody who doesn’t stand for anything.

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Forget all that troubled history, and a Clinton run for president in 2016 seems like a no-brainer, an inevitable next step after the redemption of her past few years as a well-regarded, if not quite historic, secretary of state. But remember the record, and you’ll understand why Clinton, although rested, rich and seemingly ready, has yet to commit to a presidential race (people around her insist it’s not greater than a 50-50 proposition), even as she’s an overwhelming favorite.

If Clinton says yes, she’ll have access to a bottomless pool of Democratic political talent and cash to match all those hyperbolic pronouncements about her inevitability. If she doesn’t run, the single biggest factor holding her back will be the media, according to an informal survey of three dozen friends, allies and former aides interviewed for this article. As much as anything else, her ambivalence about the race, they told us, reflects her distaste for and apprehension of a rapacious, shallow and sometimes outright sexist national political press corps acting as enablers for her enemies on the right.

Clinton isn’t insane, and she’s not stupid. “When you get beat up so often, you just get very cautious,” says Mike McCurry, her husband’s former press secretary, who joined the White House team to find a first lady traumatized by the coverage of her failed Hillarycare initiative. “She [has] had a very practical view of the media. … ‘I have to be careful, I’m playing with fire.’”

And while the white-hot anger she once felt toward the media has since hardened into a pessimistic resignation (with a dash of self-pity), she’s convinced another campaign would inevitably invite more bruising scrutiny, as her recent comments suggest. Public life “gives you a sense of being kind of dehumanized as part of the experience,” she lamented a few weeks ago to a Portland, Ore., audience. “You really can’t ever feel like you’re just having a normal day.”

When asked why Clinton hasn’t done more to reach out to reporters over the years, one Clinton campaign veteran began to spin several theories. She was too busy, she was too prone to speaking her mind and the like—then abruptly cut to the chase:

“Look, she hates you. Period. That’s never going to change.”

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How much is Hillary Clinton’s fear and loathing of the media going to influence her decision about whether to run in 2016? Of course, there are other considerations: her health, the impact of a campaign on mother-to-be Chelsea, whether the 66-year-old Clinton wants to spend “the rest of her useful life” being president, in the words of one confidant.

But consider this recent speech by one of the more improbable rising stars in Clintonworld: her tormentor-turned-defender David Brock, who exposed many of the ugliest Arkansas scandals of the Clinton years when he was a conservative investigative reporter in the 1990s. “Fox has accused Hillary Clinton of murder, compared her to a murderer and suggested she commit suicide,” Brock told a crowd at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service in March, arguing that she’s the ultimate victim of “misogyny.”

Hillary Meets the Press: The White House Years

By Margaret Slattery

1992: In Hillary Clinton’s first appearance on 60 Minutes, she and her husband, in the midst of his presidential campaign, sit for a 10-minute segment to respond to reports of an affair between Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers. Hillary’s comment that “I’m not sittin’ here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” draws fire from the country singer herself. Clinton apologizes.

1992: Facing conflict-of-interest allegations for her legal work in Arkansas, Clinton defends her career in comments that harden her abrasive image in the press. “You know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” she says, to the chagrin of stay-at-home moms. “But what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

1994: Amid the Whitewater affair, Clinton makes a rare solo appearance before White House reporters, in what becomes known as the “Pink Press Conference” for the color of her outfit. She responds to questions for more than an hour and promises to be more accessible to the Washington press corps: “I’ve always believed in a zone of privacy. … After resisting for a long time, I’ve been rezoned.”

1995: At a United Nations conference in Beijing, Clinton famously declares, “It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.” While her comments are widely praised in the United States, the Chinese government, facing criticism for its one-child policy, blacks out the broadcast of the speech.

1998: In the early stages of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton again takes to the national media to defend her husband. In an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show, she dismisses the charges against Bill Clinton as a “vast right-wing conspiracy … since the day he announced for president.”

Through intermediaries, Clinton let Brock know she appreciated that sentiment—then echoed it publicly a short time later, a welcome signal to those in her camp who felt she was too afraid to speak her mind during the 2008 presidential primary campaign she so famously lost to Barack Obama. Both Clintons still attribute that defeat to fawning coverage of her rival. “The double standard is alive and well,” Clinton told an audience in New York last month. “And I think in many respects the media is the principal propagator of its persistence.”

The battle lines have long since been drawn, argues Philippe Reines, a top Clinton communications adviser during her past decade in the Senate and State Department. “It’s like a tennis game,” he says. “You guys hit the ball at us, and we hit it back—over and over and over.”

Never mind that in recent years she’s been portrayed more as a globe-trotting celebrity than the paranoid man-hating leftist of ’90s vintage. Or that she spent most of the time since her 2008 presidential defeat being covered by the more genteel State Department press corps, a period even Reines refers to as Clinton’s “golden age” of media relations.

For much of her career, she has remained publicly unwilling (and, former advisers say, at times even privately incapable) of differentiating between malicious, coordinated political attacks and the legitimate scouring of her record undertaken by responsible reporters. In 1996, she laid down this marker in a letter to her best friend, Diane Blair, according to recently released papers. “I’m not stupid; I know I should do more to suck up to the press, I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos,” Blair quoted Clinton as saying, after Blair suggested she “fake” a “friendly” attitude toward the media. “I know I should pretend not to have any opinions—but I’m just not going to. I’m used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms.”

Clinton has gradually learned how to fake it. But to this day she’s surrounded herself with media conspiracy theorists who remain some of her favorite confidants, urged wealthy allies to bankroll independent organizations tasked with knee-capping reporters perceived as unfriendly, withdrawn into a gilded shell when attacked and rolled her eyes at several generations of aides who suggested she reach out to journalists rather than just disdaining them. Not even being nice to her in print has been a guarantor of access; reporters likely to write positive stories have been screened as ruthlessly as perceived enemies, dismissed as time-sucking sycophants or pretend-friends.

“It’s like a war. You need both defensive and offensive air power,” says Joe Conason, an author and columnist with deep connections in the Clinton camp. “She’s serious about considering a run, but she’s also aware of the price she’s going to have to pay. … That’s why she might say, ‘Who needs this?’”

“Look, she hates you. Period. That’s never going to change.”

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For Conason and others close to Clinton, the problem with this permanent war against the media is that it portrays Clinton as a victim, rather than pushing her to create a coherent rationale for her actually being president. “They are right to create the infrastructure to defend themselves when the attacks come, but they also need to emphasize the positive,” says Conason. “Out in the real world, people don’t care about all of this political stuff. They want to know who she is and what she will do. And that’s a story they’ll need to tell.”

Of course, there’s a chance Clinton really has finally mellowed out, that the new generation of reporters and editors has grown bored with the old fight (or too young to remember it), or that the pulverized, twitterized national media are now simply incapable of coalescing into a conspiratorial posse out to destroy her. And maybe, just maybe, Clinton is finally willing to really play the game.

Or maybe not.

“She wants to be president; she doesn’t want to run for president,” another Clinton veteran told us. “The worst part of running for president for her, clearly, is dealing with the press.”